Belle Cora: A Novel (53 page)

What secret could be so fraught that both Agatha, who despised me, and Anne, who loved me, would want to keep it from me? I meant to know before I left, but I did not press them right away. I asked about Evangeline and Elihu and Mrs. Harding and other old Livy residents, and at last, careful to keep all emotion out of my voice, I asked if they had had any news of Jeptha. At this, they all—Anne, Agatha, Melanchthon, and Susannah—all stared resolutely at their plates.

I waited a bit and then said, “You’re hiding something from me.”

“Belle, don’t,” said Anne.

“What’s the point? I’m sure to find out. I’ll ask around here. I’ll ask in Livy. I’ll ask in Patavium. I’ll go to Boston and ask there if I think it’s important to me.”

Leaving them to think about it, I fed Frank boiled milk with soft bread and a little molasses at the table; Anne and my aunt both watched
with a yearning that was almost lust. I asked Anne if she would like to take over the chore, and she did; and her handsome face lit up with pleasure when Frank accepted the food from her; he smiled and gurgled and flirted with her, after the manner of babies, and my aunt looked on with a starved expression. When he had gone to sleep, I brought his trunk in and showed everyone his baby clothes and his toys, and I said that I thought it would be best if I left while he was sleeping, to avoid creating a fuss.

My aunt said, “There’ll be a fuss. You just won’t be here for it.”

Anne said, “Belle, before you go, could you tell me what you think about a dress I’m making? Just you and me.” I was supposed to be a dressmaker, remember. I went up with Anne to her sewing room, and she pulled out a drawer full of material and then she closed it, abandoning the pretense upon which she had gotten me alone. She turned. She surveyed me from head to toe. “You’ve become so beautiful, Belle. Those girls you are with, they’re very pretty, too. I think the three of you are about the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen in one place. Do they work for you at the dress shop?”

“Yes. They—they work for me.”

“But they don’t make dresses, do they?”

I didn’t answer for a while, and then I said, “No.”

“Oh—oh my,” she said, and she gave a sigh with a sob in it, and we held each other. “Is he yours, honey? You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone else, not even Melanchthon, and I’ll love him just the same either way. But I should know.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, yes. Be good to him. And please don’t tell anyone, for his sake.”

“I’ll be good to him. I’m glad you brought him to me and not to her.” She let me go and looked at me. “You’re so young still. Just twenty-one.”

“Yes.”

“You can start over. Why shouldn’t you?”

“I know.”

“Don’t wait too long.”

“I won’t. I won’t. Don’t worry about me.”

There was a little hesitation then, and she said, “Well, I guess you’d better get going.”

She started for the door, but I didn’t follow her. I grabbed a
pretty little Windsor chair with a red-and-yellow flower-print cushion tied to the seat, and I sat in it and pointed to another just like it. With a wary expression, she lowered herself into the chair. “Tell me,” I said. “What is it? It’s about Agnes? And George Sackett? And what else?” Suddenly my heart was beating as if I had just run a race. “And Jeptha?”

She watched me for a little longer, then shook her head, put her hand over her mouth, and moved it over her eyes.

“My father killed himself when I was nine,” I reminded her. “Everyone in New York tried to hide it from me. They wanted to spare my feelings, but I was bound to learn. It was left for Agatha to tell me, and it was worse for me that way. I know you love me, Anne. I can hear it from you. You are the best person to tell me. Tell me.”

I waited, and at last she said: “I was going to tell you if I thought it would be any use. If you—if your shop was really a dress shop. Now it’s just going to hurt you, but here it is. Jeptha was here for William Jefferds’s funeral, and we asked after his wife. It turned out she had died the year before. It was the first we’d heard about it. And Agnes was there; and she told him—she told us—that George Sackett had consumption and was unable to go to California, and they had parted company. And we learned by letter a few weeks after, Agnes and Jeptha are engaged, and they’re going to California. At least, they want to. The missionary society that was backing George Sackett and Agnes went ahead and sent another couple. Jeptha and Agnes are both eager to go, and now Jeptha and Agnes are looking for another sponsor.”

“I see,” I said, feeling as if I had been hit by a giant hammer, and I knew I was just beginning to feel it. “Yes, I can see why you might have hesitated to tell me all that. Well, well, Agnes and Jeptha. Agnes and Jeptha at last.”

I put my head in my hands, suffering, but in the middle of it doing some thinking, because I knew I had to make the best use of my time alone with Anne, and I asked: “When did she tell you that George Sackett had consumption and they had parted ways? Was it before Jeptha said his wife was dead, or after?”

“I don’t know; I wasn’t there. I only learned it from Agatha. I see what you’re saying, but what does it matter? Anyway, what’s the use? Arabella,
even if it weren’t for Agnes, after what you’ve told me, don’t you see it’s too late?”

“Didn’t you just say the opposite?”

“Too late for you and Jeptha.”

I put my head in my hands again. Anne got up from her chair and put her arms around me. She said, “When we met him a few days after the funeral, he said he had wronged you; he’d been wrong about you. I don’t know what he meant by it, he wouldn’t say. I don’t think he knows how much he wronged you.”

AFTER WE LEFT, I HAD TOBY DRIVE
us in the direction of Livy, and at a certain landmark I had him halt and let me out. Monique and Jocelyn followed me when I walked off the road and through the woods, to a hill overlooking the Muskrat Pond. I came to a beech tree on whose thick, silvery branches Jeptha had once stood, preaching his first sermons to me, and then to the meadow where we had fondled each other at the risk of damnation. Nothing here had changed. Five autumns had stripped the trees, five winters had frozen the ground and six springs had thawed it, while my aunt awaited the end of time and I sent Jeptha letters that he never answered, and I became a millworker, a maid, a whore, and a woman who lived off the earnings of whores, and had a baby, and gave him away.

A breeze made a noisy rustle in the leaves and combed the pond; reflections of trees and grass were split and pulled apart like a deck of cards being reshuffled; and a squirrel with an acorn looked my way, as if trying to place me. I stood there, remembering and ruing, and then I walked back and told Toby to turn the carriage around.

XXXVIII

ON THE RETURN TRIP, MONIQUE AND JOCELYN
were respectfully silent, permitting me to concentrate. I stared out of the window at the buds on the apple trees. There were so many new facts, and they kept coming at me like breathless messengers, bringing dispatches from different parts of a chaotic battle.

He said he had wronged you
, Anne had told me.
He’d been wrong about you
. What could he have meant by that? It had to mean that he believed me at last. He knew I had not been unfaithful to him. I had told him in my letters about Matthew. For some reason, five and a half years ago he had not believed me. For some reason, now he did. Agnes’s part in my ruin he could not know, surely, or he would not be with her.

I thought until my head hurt. When we reached Albany, I put Jocelyn on a stage to Boston, where she was to act as my spy, helping me to find Agnes, Jeptha, and George Sackett, if they were really in that city, and to discover what she could about their real circumstances.

For what I was about to attempt, no plan would be good enough. Any plan would be overtaken by events. If I won, I would do it by putting myself in the path of opportunities and taking advantage of those that came my way.

Too late, Anne had said, only wishing me well. But she did not really know me anymore. She did not know the resources I had at my disposal, the risks I was willing to take, and how far I was willing to go.

WHEN I RETURNED TO NEW YORK
, I arranged for a wonderful coincidence to occur.

Walking along Fourth Street, I captured the attention of a slim, handsome, rather smug-looking young man with a silk hat and white kid gloves. I recognized him immediately. He noticed the look of inquiry and wonder on my face; interested, he stopped and smiled. “Can I be of assistance?”

I stared at him for another second. “Robert?”

“Yes. I—”

“Robert Godwin?”

“Do we know each other?” he asked. He was still a bachelor. He began to flirt. “I think I have a tolerable memory. Could it have deteriorated so much as to allow me to forget so lovely a face?”

“Oh, Robert,” I said, genuinely moved, even though I had worked very hard to arrange this chance encounter. I had waited on this street, which I had studiously avoided ever since I learned from Lewis that Robert belonged to the Union Club, whose front door was twenty feet from where we stood. “Robert, look at me.”

Curiosity gave way to astonishment. “It can’t be.”

“It is.”

“Arabella?”

“Yes. Yes!”

We embraced, then walked arm in arm to a nearby restaurant, and I told him, very selectively, about Livy and Cohoes, and how, since leaving the mill, I had become a dressmaker with a shop of my own on Grand Street, which he declared that he had passed a hundred times. I had probably been busy with pins and measuring tape, a matter of yards away! But men seldom enter such shops. He told me about the fall and rebirth of our grandfather’s affairs, and his own—Robert’s—career as an attorney at law, and—oh, wait, hang on to my hat—he told me that in finding him not only had I also found Edward and our grandparents, but I had also found Lewis! Yes, it was true, Lewis had chanced into renewed contact with the family before I had! He was in a boarding school, the same that Edward and Robert had gone to after our mother died.

“It’s like a dream,” I said. “It’s like a wonderful happy ending in a book.”

It was not necessary for me to feign strong feelings.

At Robert’s insistence, we took a hack north up Broadway, all the way to Bloomingdale—where, according to the maps that the Corporation had already drawn, 100th Street would be one day. We passed farms, and country stores, and ponds whose surfaces were stroked by weeping willows. “There it is,” said Robert, about a big house with a white-columned portico: it was the house my grandfather had purchased two years ago and had been living in all this time. “Just wait,” he said, and put his hand over mine, obviously thrilled to be reunited with his baby sister.

As the hack turned onto the gravel road to a house I had never set my
eyes on before, I blinked back tears. Robert put his arm around my shoulders and watched me, smiling, thinking he knew what was in my heart, but of course he couldn’t know. Even if the facts were put before him, he couldn’t know. I felt as if I were coming home at last. I felt as if all that was broken could be fixed. If anyone could do it, my grandfather could. All the indelible stains could be washed clean.

At the same time, I knew it was false and dangerous. I would have to be vigilant with myself. I wasn’t here to be made right. I couldn’t be made right.

To the elderly servant who met us at the door, Robert said, “Tell Mr. Godwin to consult the health of his heart before coming down to greet us; this young lady and I have a great though very pleasant shock for him and for Mrs. Godwin.”

We waited in a comfortable drawing room. A vase with daffodils stood on the lid of a piano near a window; Robert idly turned the stool a few times, sat, squinted at the sheets on the music stand, and made straight bars of shadow appear and wink out as his fingers pressed the sleek rods of wood and ivory. The notes were tinny. The rhythm was halting. Never had a piece of music moved me so. I reminded myself that he had not answered a single one of my letters when I was in Livy. I supposed my grandfather had told him not to. He ought to have disobeyed.

There were footsteps, and Robert turned to an archway that opened to the hall; I looked in that direction, too.